From Fitbit Blaze wearable band to the Gigato App for Android: The latest from the tech-world!

You probably know of Fitbit, one of the largest companies in the fitness wearables business. Their previous fitness watch, Fitbit Surge, is one of the best fitness trackers with continuous heartrate monitoring. Now, Fitbit has launched its second smart fitness watch called the Blaze and it offers improvements in both hardware and software.

The first thing you will notice is that the Blaze has a colour touchscreen with new watch faces and animations. While the Surge was a single-piece design, the Blaze has two parts — a detachable core and a strap with metal frame. The core makes it easy to charge the Blaze — you just use the USB-charging cradle box. Straps are replaceable and there are already multiple, third-party straps available online. The Blaze also has continuous heart-rate monitoring and a 9-axis sensor for tracking activity and sleep. However, the Blaze skips built-in GPS — instead, it uses your phone’s GPS for tracking. This means you will need to keep a phone connected if you want to map your exercise route.

Where the Blaze excels is in software. It tracks various exercises, including running, biking, weight-training and treadmill. What we liked was that you don’t need to activate the exercisetracking every time. It kicks in 10 minutes after you start exercising and automatically identifies what activity you are doing. The other impressive function is called FitStar — it uses the watch’s LCD screen to show you animated workouts. Currently, there are three: warmup, 7-minute workout and 10-minute abs.

Apart from this, you get auto sleep tracking, smartphone notifications (calls, SMS and calendar alerts) and smartphone music control. Like the Surge, Blaze connects via Bluetooth to your smartphone and transfers data to the free Fitbit app. The app has a dashboard where you can get an overview of your steps, heart rate, distance, calories, sleep and other data. Depending on your activity, the app rewards you for completing various challenges.

Its battery lasts four- f ive days, which is great, considering it is continuously tracking your heart rate. Overall, the Blaze is a great fitness smartwatch, but the steep price ensures that it is only meant for hardcore fitness enthusiasts.

The developers of this game, Foursaken Media, already have an arsenal of games. We use the term literally because most of their games are either castledefence games or zombie shooters. This is a 3D arcade game that combines the qualities of a shooter and a castle defence — where you are protecting your area from multiple waves of enemies. The War Tortoise is like your tank, armoured and weaponsied. All you need to do is aim in the general direction of the enemy and the automatic turret takes care of the rest.

Obviously, the enemies get harder to kill as the game progresses and you need to upgrade your weapons or call in reinforcements — both of which cost money. That is where you can either use the money you earn through levels, pay actual money, watch in-game ads to earn, or use a combination of these. The game sounds simple but is incredibly fun and there are all sorts of enemies (even flying ones), eight different worlds to explore and different kinds of weather to keep you on your toes. Try it out while it is still free.

— Hitesh Raj Bhagat

Gigato App for Android Get it for: Free

For smartphone users, apps drive the overall experience. However, apps can also consume a lot of data. What if, apart from providing a rich experience, apps could also help you earn some of that used data back? This is exactly what a free app called Gigato aims to do. You need to sign up using a prepaid number and email ID. The app then scans your phone to find installed apps that offer data schemes — for instance, if you have BookMyShow app, using 5MB data, the app will add 5MB data back into your account. You can also see a list of apps that are not installed on your phone along with the offers they are providing. You can then install them from the Play Store.

Note that you can only ask for a recharge of your data pack after you have accumulated more than 150MB on Gigato. Currently, Gigato has a referral programme, by which you can earn up to 1GB data in total by sharing Gigato on your social networks. When using the app, you need to make sure you are using a data connection and not WiFi — the data consumed over WiFi is not counted by Gigato.